Robert Fulford's column about Henry
Newbolt

In sexuality, Peter Gay began to argue some years ago, the
Victorians were not at all as they represented themselves. In
1984, on the first page of his five-volume work, The
Bourgeois Experience, Gay explained that the reserve and
moral earnestness of the Victorians had "seduced" (a carefully
chosen verb) us into believing their erotic lives were extremely
limited and almost comically proper. By bringing a Freudian
curiosity to everything from public sculpture to private diaries,
Gay demonstrated otherwise.

The Victorian bedroom has since become a favourite research site
for students of sexual history, but in all the material they've
uncovered there's probably no story odder than the one Susan
Chitty tells in Playing the Game: A Biography of Sir Henry
Newbolt (Quartet).

What makes Henry Newbolt (1862-1938) especially notable in this
context is that he was famously, gloriously, even
flagrantly Victorian--more Victorian, certainly, than
the queen. A totally respectable figure, Newbolt was a lawyer, a
novelist, a playwright, and a magazine editor. Above all, he was
a poet who sang the virtues of chivalry and sportsmanship
combined in the service of the British Empire.

In 1897 his reputation took form around a poem about a schoolboy
cricketer who grows up to fight in Africa. There, in the panic
of battle ("The Gatling's jammed and the Colonel dead"), he's
stirred to heroic action by a school days memory: "his Captain's
hand on his shoulder smote - / Play up! play up! and play the
game!" Those last eight words became famous as the expression of
Newbolt's belief that war should be fought in the spirit taught
by games masters in good English schools. One critic said
Newbolt could lift hearts like Tennyson. Another called his work
"eminently virile" (which, at the time, was praise).

Susan Chitty, the biographer of Edward Lear and Charles Kingsley,
is married to Sir Henry Newbolt's great nephew. She pays homage
to Newbolt's verse, and notes that poets such as John Betjeman
and Kingsley Amis admired it. But clearly she's more interested
in his life, for reasons that soon become obvious.

As a 25-year-old lawyer, Henry fell in love with Margaret
Duckworth, a woman of great charm who had many qualities
associated with young men. She rode to hounds at a furious clip
(much faster than Henry) and she was as interested in science as
in music; she defied her hyper-religious mother by studying
Darwinian biology. Henry liked her mannish side (and would begin
letters to her with "Dear Lad") but when he started to court her
an impediment emerged. Margaret was already in love with someone
else, her cousin, a beautiful young woman named Ella Coltman.
They were both members of the Grecians, a club of women who
studied Greek poetry, disdained the company of men, and privately
gave each other male names drawn from the classics. Margaret
announced she would marry Henry only if Ella became part of their
intimate life together, and Henry agreed.

For years, Henry went to the law courts every day while Margaret
went over to visit Ella at her family's mansion. All three spent
evenings together, and Newbolt's friends understood that when
they invited Henry and Margaret for the weekend, they invited
Ella as well. Even so, Ella began complaining to Henry that she
felt left out, an unwanted third party.

Chitty explains that Newbolt solved that problem by making Ella
his mistress. Margaret understood. The women were not precisely
equal (Margaret had the children, Ella played aunt), but they
appear not to have been jealous of each other. Newbolt
scrupulously divided his sexual attention. He left among his
papers a ledger page showing columns of figures which, Chitty
tells us, "represent the number of times he slept with each of
his women each month between 1904 and 1917, averaging as much as
12 per head per month."

In middle age they reached a new arrangement, with Ella in a
London house (now marked with a plaque in Newbolt's honour) and
Margaret in the country. But there were complications. Henry
fell in love with a third woman whom neither Margaret nor Ella
liked; since she complained a lot, they named her Lydia Languish.
And Margaret found another man, the sculptor Henry Furse, in
whose house Margaret and Newbolt lived for a time. So Newbolt at
that point had two wives and a girlfriend, Margaret two husbands.
Nevertheless, the original triangle was still in place at
Newbolt's death.

His literary reputation, on the other hand, withered. In England
the moral squalor of the First World War made his boyish verses
feel grotesquely obsolete, as he acknowledged. Elsewhere in the
empire, his sensibility had a longer life. In 1923 he made a
cross-country lecture tour of Canada and discovered to his dismay
that wherever he went, audiences loudly demanded he recite "Play
up," apparently the only Newbolt poem they knew. "It's a kind of
Frankenstein's Monster that I created thirty years ago," he
complained. And its status in Canada lasted for at least another
generation. When I went to public school in the early 1940s it
was still in our poetry anthology, a perfect example of imperial
tradition surviving at the extremities of empire long after
becoming unfashionable at the centre.